Today marks the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Alastair Windsor, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, who was born on this Day in 1914. The great-grandson of both Queen Victoria and her son King Edward VII lost his Princely Title during the First World War and mysteriously died in Canada during the Second World War.
The only son of Prince Arthur of Connaught and Princess Alexandra, Duchess of Fife, Prince Alastair of Connaught was paternally the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and maternally the great-grandson of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. His godparents were King George V (maternal great-uncle), King Alfonso XIII of Spain, Queen Alexandra (maternal great-grandmother), Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught (paternal grandfather), Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll (great-aunt), and Princess Mary (cousin). Through his paternal aunt, Crown Princess Margareta of Sweden, he was the first cousin of several Swedish Princes and Queen Ingrid of Denmark.
In 1917, King George V restricted the titles of Prince and Princess to the children of the sovereign, the children of the sovereign’s sons, and the eldest living son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and this Prince Alistair lost his Princely Title and then sued the courtesy title of Earl of Macduff as the Heir to his mother’s Dukedom of Fife.
Educated at Bryanston and the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, the Earl of Macduff was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Royal Scots Greys (2nd Dragoons) in 1935 before being promoted to lieutenant in 1939, and and being assigned to Ottawa as aide-de-camp to the Earl of Athlone, where he succeeded his grandfather as the 2nd Duke of Connaught and Strathearn and Earl of Sussex in 1942.
In April 1943, the 28 year-old Duke of Connaught “was found dead on the floor of his room at Rideau Hall. He had died, apparently, from hypothermia.” His ashes were interred at St Ninian’s Chapel in Braemar. The Dukedoms of Connaught and Strathearn went extinct on his death, while the Dukedom of Fife was eventually inherited by his cousin, the 3rd Duke of Fife.
The diaries of Sir Tommy Lascelles, recorded that both the regiment and Athlone had rejected him as incompetent, and he fell out of a window when drunk and perished of hypothermia overnight.
